The Beast of the Eastern Front
The carriage and I tore out of the mansion in a frenzy, racing madly toward the Eastern Front—straight into the jaws of hell. When it finally lurched to a stop, I stepped down into pure pandemonium: a choking haze of dust, screams, and blood.
Boom! Boooom!
“Hey! You bumbling idiot, stop standing there! Move your ass!”
The moment my boots hit the ground in that ragged, threadbare uniform, the stench slammed into me—familiar metallic blood, the acrid sulfur of burning magic circles, and the sickening rot of decaying corpses. It nearly suffocated me.
“Save me! I’m still alive!!!”
The sky was blanketed in dark-red smoke and swirling dust. Massive fireballs erupted skyward, blades flashed, and the sickening crunch of shattering bones never stopped. Magic ripped the earth apart, sending chunks of human flesh flying in every direction. The slaughter unfolded before my eyes with merciless clarity.
This was the “battlefield” my father had spoken of.
It wasn’t the neat columns of numbers in reports or the tidy lines on tactical maps I’d studied in the library. Every breath here was agony. Death bared its teeth in every direction, leaving no room to stand. I felt as if my own body were already being trampled beneath the chaos.
“Hey, young master! Over here! There’s no seat at the table for a pampered lord who only knows how to eat rations! Go crouch in that corner and wait to die!”
A soldier bellowed at me, his voice raw. His face was a mess of coarse beard, sweat, and countless scars. The way they called me “young master” was pure mockery. After all, I had never properly gripped a sword in my life. I possessed neither the arms to wield its weight nor the hands to inscribe magic circles.
The soldiers here were all honed into lethal weapons, sharp as blades. Next to them, my very existence was a stain. My father’s warning that my feeble body wouldn’t last a single day rang in my ears like bitter truth.
Volgis, the middle-aged soldier passing beside me, clicked his tongue. His eyes swept over me, brimming with contempt and disdain.
“What can a greenhorn like that even do? A spoiled young master who can’t even control his own two legs. We’d be lucky if he doesn’t just become another piece of meat. The shadow of death’s already in his eyes.”
There was no refuting him. I was useless here. My weak frame and hesitant steps marked me as dead weight on a battlefield where only the strong survived.
The first battle was hell incarnate. The clang of steel on steel ripped at my ears. Incoming flames of magic scorched my skin. Right beside me, a soldier’s head exploded under an enemy axe. Red and black blood mixed with brain matter splattered across my face. The nausea hit so hard I staggered and vomited.
Fear paralyzed every muscle. No logic, no knowledge, no calculation—none of a weak scholar’s tools mattered here. Only raw instinct drove me. I flailed desperately, fighting not to die.
I snatched up a broken enemy sword lying in the dirt and drove it into someone’s side, then swung wildly while stumbling. “Haaaaah…!”
The enemy before me collapsed. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to see who it was.
“…Huk… huk…”
I burrowed my body into a pile of corpses. I couldn’t tell whether the screams echoing in my ears were mine or the death throes of dying men. My hands were slick with cold blood.
“…Heh… ehehehehehe…”
I had killed someone with my own hands. Even if it was to save myself, that sensation would never leave me.
That night, only frigid silence filled the trench. The dirt floor was soaked with blood and mud. Caron, the soldier beside me, scratched at the ground with bloodstained fingers. His face was caked in grime and gore; one eye already looked dead. His lips were cracked, his gaze drowned in despair.
“Cold, young master? Where the hell would you find warmth in a place like this? Even dreams are frozen. Back home, it’s probably snowing by now.”
He muttered under his breath, fingers tracing something in the dirt. Through exhausted eyes, I made out the faint shape of a leaf.
“A leaf… I see.”
My voice was hoarse. I wasn’t one for casual conversation.
“It’s the last picture I’ll send to my little girl. If she sees it, she’ll believe I’m coming home alive. But… can anyone really return from this hell?”
His voice was thick with lingering regret and resignation. I had no words. Looking at him, I thought of Yua. In this inferno where I fought tooth and nail to protect her, someone else’s final fragment of life was nothing more than a drawing of a leaf. Here, humans were reduced to living meat. Every emotion was simply dead weight.
Yet somehow, that single drawing felt no different from the existence of Yua that drove me forward. Perhaps he, too, was only trying to protect his family.
As time dragged on, I changed. Reason and emotion became luxuries. Survival was my only purpose.
I began to study death. The arc of a blade, the exact point where magic detonated, the patterns of enemy movement, the direction soldiers fell when they died. Direct combat was impossible for my frail body, so I mastered evasion and concealment instead. I curled beneath piles of corpses, pretending to be dead. I slipped among the wounded, pretending I was one of them. When comrades fell beside me, I used their bodies as cover to crawl deeper into the shadows.
To survive, I could not afford to be picky about the method.
My hands became crusted with blood and dirt. My heart hardened, growing colder and heavier with every passing day. As a bearer of Heavenfield blood, I cast everything aside to survive. All of it—for Yua.
During endless marches, I went days without water; my tongue swelled and my mouth cracked like dry earth. Starvation became routine. Even when consciousness began to slip, I drove myself forward with sheer will.
Then the earth shook violently. Our forces fell into despair. The enemy mage corps rained flame magic down on us, shattering the front lines.
“Damn it! They’ve got too many mages in their rear! We can’t break through the center! The magic barrier’s impenetrable!”
Soldiers screamed. I, too, was on the verge of being surrounded. An enemy fireball slammed into the ground right in front of me. The blast hurled my body through the air. When I regained consciousness, I was buried in a mountain of bloody corpses. My ears rang with agonized shrieks.
“Save… save me…”
The voice beside me belonged to Garen. One of his legs had been severed by magical shrapnel; blood sprayed like a fountain. Instinctively, I burrowed deeper into the corpses. Garen seemed to be calling my name, but his voice soon dissolved into bloody foam. Another massive flame spell engulfed the formation, and Garen vanished into the inferno like smoke. I squeezed my eyes shut in terror.
I never learned how to fight like the soldiers. I simply survived. In every battle, I grew more skilled at hiding myself within death’s blind spots. My survival was always cowardly.
Volgis never hid his disgust when he looked at me.
“You really are something, young master. While good men are dropping like flies, you keep popping up without a scratch. It’s like you’ve got a demon watching over you. Tsk tsk.”
I offered no rebuttal. He wasn’t wrong.
Once, we were caught in a deadly encirclement. That was when I saw her—Claire, the female warrior. Though she was a noble’s child dragged into this war just like me, she refused to yield. She stood alone against a swarm of enemy soldiers, but a magic arrow from behind pierced her thigh. The moment she staggered and dropped to one knee, several enemies charged her.
I averted my eyes. Even if I rushed in, I knew I couldn’t save her. I would only die with her. Cold calculation kept me rooted in place.
Then she screamed at me, voice sharp as a blade.
“Leo! What the hell is that look in your eyes?! You’re just going to stand there while your comrade dies?!”
My gaze locked onto the enemy sword swinging toward her exposed back. But I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. For one terrible instant, it seemed the blade would claim her. At the last possible second, however, the soldier beside her took the blow instead. Blood sprayed in every direction as Claire rolled across the ground to safety.
She forced her wounded body upright and glared at me again. Her eyes were razor-sharp, cutting straight through my cowardly silence and pathetic disguise.
“So you know how to survive after all. I thought you were just some pathetic little lord. Watching a bastard like you trample over the blood of dying comrades makes my guts twist. Is the law of this battlefield that selfish pieces of shit like you get to live?”
Her words were not praise. They were condemnation. My cowardice—abandoning comrades to hide among corpses. I said nothing. She wasn’t wrong.
Months passed. The war devolved into a brutal war of attrition. Hundreds, thousands of soldiers died every single day. Heroes no longer existed. Everyone simply thrashed in the pit of death.
My presence became like a faint shadow on the battlefield. I contributed to raising the soldiers’ survival rates, yet I received no praise. Their eyes only held strange fear and desperate hunger for life.
If you stay near that young master, you might actually live.
Such an unwritten rule quietly spread through the ranks. Gradually, they began calling me “Cold-hearted Leo.” There were no glorious “achievements” here, but my observation and survival instinct reduced allied casualties. The soldiers feared me, yet they stared at my lips, hanging on every word of silence. My silence became more valuable than swords or spells.
The one who directed the most efficient path to survival—that became my role.
Little by little, I was becoming part of this hell. Not because of the Heavenfield blood my father boasted about, but through nothing more than my base, wretched survival instinct for Yua’s sake.
Then one day, everything changed.
We had infiltrated deep behind enemy lines to sever their supply route. The operation seemed to be proceeding smoothly. The moment we pushed into the heart of their camp, a ferocious counterattack erupted. It was an ambush. They had been waiting. Magic and steel rained down from every direction like a storm.
Our forces were instantly surrounded and faced total annihilation.
I burrowed into a pile of corpses and held my breath. Even then, my cowardly survival instinct searched for the slightest gap between life and death.
That was when it happened.
Right beside my hiding spot, atop the bodies of fallen soldiers, an enemy mage began forming a colossal orb of flame. Screams of burning agony rose from the men beneath it. One of those voices belonged to Volgis.
“Young master! Save… save me! I can’t die like this… I can’t!”
Volgis’s eyes found mine. They burned with raw terror and a desperate, aching hunger to live. He screamed my name with everything he had left. I curled tighter into a ball. My breath froze in my throat.
Volgis! I was the one who told him to hide there!
His pupils trembled as he repeated my name. Leo… please…!
In that moment, I heard Yua’s voice in my ears.
Leo… don’t go! Please don’t go! Leo! Please!
The last cold words I had thrown at her before leaving: We won’t have anything more to see.
The flame orb swallowed the sky. Scorching fire erupted, and Volgis vanished.
The entire world before me warped and twisted. Volgis’s screams, Yua’s pleas, my father’s reprimands, Volgis’s final gaze—everything blended together and exploded inside my skull.
“Ugh… Uwaaaaaaaaaa!!!”
A deranged scream tore out of me. I could no longer endure any of it. Dying… I didn’t want to die anymore! I couldn’t die! If I couldn’t see Yua again, I refused to die!
I shot to my feet. Corpses, blood, and dirt exploded outward in every direction. There was no longer any room for analysis. Only one truth remained.
If I didn’t kill, I would be killed.
In my hand was a battered, well-worn sword that had been lying in the dirt. I seized it.
Before me stood the enemy mage who had just hurled the massive flame orb. My heart hammered wildly, yet a single thought dominated my mind.
“Kill… I’ll kill you…!”
My body charged forward like a broken marionette, staggering and twisting. I didn’t even know how to swing a sword properly. Instead of the blade, I used the hilt, the blunt edge—anything—to smash the mage’s face repeatedly.
“Haaaaah!!”
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The sound of breaking bones filled the air. The mage screamed and collapsed. His magic power ran wild, exploding from within. At the same time, other enemy soldiers rushed me. A flying blade sliced my arm. I ignored it. A magic arrow buried itself in my side. Strangely, I felt no pain. There was no time to feel pain.
I charged recklessly, striking, stabbing, and biting anything I could reach. The sword was no longer a tool. It was an extension of my rage. Every muscle in my body screamed. My breath scraped at my throat. Blood poured from countless wounds and flesh tore away, yet I refused to stop. I no longer knew whether I was human or beast.
The dying enemies’ screams reached my ears, but all I could hear was Yua’s faint weeping.
“I… I can’t die! Not without seeing you… I can’t die…!”
It was the only incantation keeping me alive.
My body was a ruined wreck, yet I did not fall. My eyes were drenched in blood, but somehow my vision had never been clearer. The madness of kill or be killed. In that ultimate choice, my worthless flesh adapted to a new way of surviving.
It was a massacre.
Yes. In the end, I was still a Heavenfield.
Pathetic calculations could never save the person I wanted to protect. So instead… I would kill them all.
That was how I survived in the heart of hell—like a single mad beast.
The soldiers around me could only stare in terror at my rampage. In their eyes, I was no longer human. I was an incomprehensible horror. An undying monster. A gruesome, blood-soaked struggle of the weak.
I survived.
And when the war finally ended, I had become a hero.